Eric Prydz has announced a “dramatically evolved version” of his acclaimed Holosphere production, which will debut as part of an exclusive residency at Ibiza’s tech-forward venue, [UNVRS].

Revered for pushing the boundaries of audiovisual experiences, the Swedish electronic music icon is set to unveil an ambitious update of the groundbreaking concept, which he first introduced in 2019. The arena-scale Holosphere 2.0 show will be the “biggest show production ever undertaken in Ibiza,” according to a press release shared with EDM.com.

Holosphere made headlines when it debuted at Tomorrowland, featuring an eight-ton, two-story-tall sphere so massive that the festival had to redesign its grounds to fit it. Despite its awe-inspiring impact, the original Holosphere was tragically crushed when a stage collapsed, leaving fans with just one chance to witness its spectacle. Now, after five years of technological advancements and meticulous design, Holosphere 2.0 promises to surpass its predecessor in every way.

The new version isn’t just bigger—it’s smarter. Holosphere 2.0 incorporates a “feature film’s worth” of original animations, 3D holographic effects and custom transparent LED layers covering its interior, exterior and even the internal volume of the sphere.

Designed to create multidimensional visual experiences that evolve in real-time with his music, the immersive production is “a world first,” according to [UNVRS]. The venue is said to be one of the few worldwide capable of supporting the show’s scale and technical demands.

“With Holosphere 2.0, [Prydz] has reached an entirely new level, seamlessly blending cutting-edge technology with an ambitious scale like never before,” said Yann Pissenem, Founder and CEO of The Night League and Ushuaïa Entertainment. “I can’t wait to present this new chapter of Eric Prydz at [UNVRS], where audiences will witness something truly unprecedented—transforming this residency into a one-of-a-kind future-forward show that will redefine the global audiovisual experience in 2025.”

Prydz, meanwhile, called the residency “our most technically advanced show ever attempted.” It is scheduled to kick off at [UNVRS] June 2nd and run for 14 weeks until its finale on September 1st.

You can watch the trailer below and purchase tickets here.

If you were looking for a reinvigorating event to pull you from a mid-winter slump, John Summit and his Experts Only label have you covered as they gear up (literally) for their Vail Weekender event.

Spanning from Valentines Day until February 16th, the AEG-produced event promises Après ski-themed day parties, mountainside DJ sets and various afterparties to complement the weekend’s stacked lineup 

Joining the dance music superstar on February 14th and 15th are Layton Giordani, Cassian, Ranger Trucco, AYYBO, ChaseWest and more. Attendees can expect to see Summit multiple times over the course of the event.

To complete the busy weekend, the beloved label and event brand will host a “Mountain Top Pop-Up” on Sunday, followed by one final afterparty to put the cherry on top of a can’t-miss weekend. Experts Only was recently named 2024’s best record label in EDM.com‘s list of the year’s top industry leaders.

Tickets for the 2025 Experts Only Vail Weekender event are on sale now.

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A familiar transmission: Breakaway Music Festival, presented by CELSIUS, is back with another massive lineup. 

This time around, the nation’s top traveling music festival is heading to Tampa, Florida. Scheduled for April 25-26 in the Bay of Spiritu Santo, the can’t-miss festival will feature 20 national touring acts and five local DJs.

Louis The Child’s bubbly beats and FISHER’s infectious house music will soundtrack the first day along with DJ sets from Disco Lines, Dr. Fresch, CHYL, Rich DietZ and more. The energy is bound to explode the second day, when Knock2 and ISOxo take over with their unapologetic bangers after performances by Nostalgix, Westend, VNSSA and EDM.com Class of 2024 star Hamdi, among others.

True to form, Breakaway’s organizers will again elevate the festival experience with The Launch Pad presented by White Claw Surge and a Silent Disco featuring local artists and various onsite experiences.

Check out the full Breakaway Tampa 2025 lineup below and purchase tickets here. Two-day and single-day GA, VIP, Ultra VIP passes are available now as well as Space Deck tickets and tables.

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Cue the Men in Black neuralyzers, because if you told us Will Smith would be headlining an EDM festival in 2025, we’d swear we were imagining things.

The Academy Award-winning actor is set to headline Spain’s Dreambeach Festival, which is scheduled for August 7-10 at the scenic Villaricos Beach. While he’s no stranger to performing—his ’90s rap hits with DJ Jazzy Jeff still hold cultural weight—his presence at a festival dominated by electronic artists raises eyebrows.

Smith is headlining Dreambeach alongside Steve Aoki and Swedish House Mafia’s Steve Angello. The festival’s 2025 lineup also includes Nicky Romero, Subtronics, Sub Focus, Space Laces, Dimension, Showtek and EDM.com Class of 2023 artist Indira Paganotto, among others.

Smith today also revealed his first album in 20 years, Based on a True Story, which is due out in March via SLANG Recordings. The album is likely to feature electronic music after he spent time in Ibiza “working on new music, drawing inspiration from the dance scene on the island” in the summer of 2024.

Tickets to Dreambeach 2025 are available now. You can check out the full lineup below and find more information on the festival’s website.

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The organizers of Sol Fest, an electronic music and arts festival in North Florida, have announced an indefinite hiatus.

They announced the decision today in an emotional statement, reflecting on the challenges, triumphs and the spirit of the independent festival, which launched three years ago.

“The road hasn’t been easy, but your support has been the driving force that kept us going,” the statement reads. “We want to extend our deepest appreciation to the entire team, volunteers, friends, and family who helped us bring this to life.”

Sol Fest, known for its bass-focused lineups and deep-rooted sense of community, faced significant hurdles throughout its tenure. Organizers cited unexpected challenges from the very beginning, including the sudden loss of the CEO of their original venue, which forced a last-minute relocation. They detailed extensive efforts to secure a new home for the festival, working with officials and even personally funding venue preparations.

Despite the indefinite hiatus, the festival’s proprietors haven’t pulled the plug entirely. “This isn’t goodbye, Sol Fam,” they wrote. “For now, hold your loved ones close and keep the Sol Fest spirit alive!”

Last year’s Sol Fest featured headlining performances by Rezz, CloZee, LSDREAM, Bob Moses, Dabin, Dr. Fresch, Elderbrook, G Jones, Lettuce and EDM.com Class of 2024 artist Of The Trees.

You can read Sol Fest’s full statement below.

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Tech house lovers can rejoice now that their beloved Dirtybird Campout is back.

The summer camp-inspired festival is returning after a two-year hiatus, teaming up with Northern Nights Music Festival for an unforgettable collaborative party in California this July.

Each independent festival brings its own unique spirit to the table, with Dirtybird’s quirky essence blending seamlessly with Northern Nights’ immersive natural setting and wellness-focused activities. That includes “legal onsite cannabis sales and consumption,” a groundbreaking offering the festival says it pioneered.

The return of Dirtybird Campout coincides with the label’s monumental 20th anniversary.

“While many festivals are canceling due to rising costs, we sought a partner who shares our values of what a festival experience should be, and we’re doing it bigger than ever,” said Deron Delgado, Dirtybird’s Label Manager. “Northern Nights is a perfect choice—their vision aligns seamlessly with ours, making this collaboration effortless. We can’t wait for fans to participate in the best of both worlds.”

“Northern Nights has always been guided by the mission to bring the city to the country, a vision that began with a Dirtybird Showcase at our very first festival,” added Andrew Borgelt, Northern Nights co-founder. “This collaboration is more than just a partnership—it’s a powerful demonstration of what festivals can achieve when they unite to create something bigger than ourselves.”

“By blending Dirtybird’s signature camp games and vibrant energy with the unparalleled magic of the Redwoods, we’re creating a festival like no other.”

The festival will take place July 18-20, 2025 at Cook’s Valley Campground, a picturesque location surrounded by the towering California Redwoods and tranquil Eel River.

Tickets are on sale now.

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Consider the paradox of David Guetta, a DJ who has spent four decades helping people forget time exists while simultaneously mastering its passage.

As he launches another totemic Vegas DJ residency, he’s thinking about the same thing: how to make something timeless in an illustrious career that has defied time itself.

“It still feels like a miracle,” Guetta says of his career with a disarming humility. “Getting there is very hard. Staying there is harder. And being happy is even harder.”

We’re chatting over Zoom and his newborn son has just made a brief appearance, carried in by his girlfriend. The moment provides a striking contrast: here’s a man who has devoted his life to keeping people young—if only for a few hours at a time—face to face with both the future and the weight of his own legacy in the Entertainment Capital of the World.

The French icon began playing records before electronic music had a commercial future, went on to shape that future and now, at 57, refuses to stop reimagining it. He’s now beginning another “new cycle,” he says, though he’s careful not to define exactly what that means.

“Am I going to be able to come with a new sound again?” Guetta muses. “That, to me, is bigger than anything.”

We’ll all see soon enough as Guetta prepares for his latest high-profile Vegas venture, a DJ residency at the lavish Fontainebleau. The brand-new resort’s LIV Nightclub and LIV Beach daytime experience, developed by Miami hospitality legend Dave Grutman, aim to change the fabric of Sin City nightlife.

It’s a big move for Guetta, who has found a new home on The Strip after 12 years of seminal work at Wynn Nightlife’s XS Nightclub and Encore Beach Club. His reverence for the pioneering Wynn brand is palpable, and the weight of the moment is not lost on him.

“I’m nervous,” Guetta admits. “But I’m coming with the weapons to make it fucking insane.”

“I think every challenge is always positive,” he adds. “Being uncomfortable is what makes you become better.”

This philosophy has guided him through multiple reinventions on the road from underground house DJ to EDM festival headliner. When he started his career, he wasn’t trying to be a “superstar DJ,” he says,” because it didn’t exist.”

The simplicity of those early days as a teenager back in Paris brings him comfort, as he recalls charging just a dollar for entry to basement parties he promoted at school with hand-made flyers. He soon started spinning house music in local clubs like Le Broad, for which he remains deeply grateful.

“I was so happy,” Guetta recalls. “It was already a blessing that they would even give me a fee to play music—to have fun. I feel very blessed because I don’t take anything for granted.”

Perhaps that’s his real secret, the ability to maintain wonder and to treat each night behind the decks as both a gift and a challenge.

Looking at him now—a father again at the height of his career—it’s clear that he has mastered that most elusive of arts: staying forever young while growing ever wiser. He also credits as inspiration fellow LIV residents John Summit and Dom Dolla, a pair of house music superstars over 20 years his junior.

But don’t mistake his clarity for complacency. In an industry that treats youth as currency, Guetta has managed to transform age into an asset.

“I don’t do this to stay relevant,” he insists. “I do this to keep a state of mind that is going to force me to stay relevant.”

A career as storied as Guetta’s is measured not just in hits or headlining slots, but in the memories left behind. Since those humble days needling vinyl in Parisian cellars, the club has been his time machine to those memories, and dopamine its key.

Decades later at LIV Las Vegas, his vision for the club is entwined in those roots. Guetta wants to recreate something increasingly rare in our hyperconnected age: the pure, unfiltered dancefloor experiences of his early career, before smartphones turned every moment into content and partying meant moving your feet instead of your thumbs.

In today’s war between FOMO and flow state, excessive smartphone use has emerged as one of the electronic dance music community’s most contentious flashpoints. A grim study recently reported that 55% of respondents admitted they prioritize capturing footage of a music performance over being present in the moment, even though 13% said they rarely watch back the videos they record anyway.

While some argue that attendees should be free to use their devices as they please, others bemoan them for provoking a sense of trepidation in those who want to dance freely without being documented. Many DJs have also lamented smartphones for corroding the connection with their fans, whose experiences are diluted by the compulsion to capture the moment.

Guetta is a neutral party in this ongoing debate—all he cares about is making people dance so much that LIV’s proprietors question the club’s structural integrity. One of them, Fontainebleau Development CEO Jeffrey Soffer, said “you’re missing an unparalleled experience” by skipping out on the residency.

“I’m challenging myself… I hope people are going to remember this,” Guetta says. “Because this also matters a lot to me: to leave memories of happiness in people’s lives.”

Guetta will kick off his exclusive two-year residency with Fontainebleau on Saturday, March 22nd. It’s the first of 13 performances inside LIV Las Vegas in 2025, the last of which is scheduled for May 31st. Tickets are available now.

The popularity of sub-genres rises and falls in the electronic music world, but few could have predicted the demise of big room house music in the mid-twenty-tens. But the genre is now staging a furious comeback, sparking new creativity and connection amongst producers worldwide.

That’s according to a recent study by MIDiA and Splice, whose research shows that downloads of big room house samples surged by an average of 188.9% annually over the past two years. Over 5.3 million downloads were recorded in 2024 alone. 

The resurgence of big room house seems to be fueled by nostalgia and the ageless desire for connection on the dancefloor. Producers across the globe are tapping into the genre’s festival-ready sound to evoke the memories of hands-in-the-air moments that defined the 2010s, soundtracked by influential producers the likes of Martin Garrix, Hardwell, W&W and Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike. At the same time, they’re reinventing the style with fresh production techniques and cross-genre influences.

This revival isn’t confined to traditional strongholds of EDM. Cities like Sydney, where downloads of big room house grew by an impressive 196.7%; and Johannesburg, with a 237.7% increase; demonstrate the genre is perhaps making new inroads.

As more creators from the Global South, such as Brazil and South Africa, incorporate their unique sounds into the genre, big room house is finding a whole new source of fuel to once again become a global phenomenon.

You can download the full “MIDiA x Splice Sounds of 2025” study here.

In the dim glow of the studio, a musician strums a chord progression that took months to perfect. Across the internet, an AI churns out a melody in seconds.

Such is the reality of making music in 2025. But Deezer, the Paris-based streaming service, is taking action to ensure human artists aren’t having to elbow AI programs at every turn in their efforts to earn a living from royalty-based income.

The company revealed this week that its newly launched AI-detection tool is already flagging 10,000 tracks daily, representing a staggering 10% of all uploads to the platform. These are fully formed “songs” created by advanced prompt-based tools the likes of Suno and Udio. But Deezer isn’t simply hitting delete. Instead, it’s quietly quarantining these tracks from playlists and broader recommendations.

“Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption,” said Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier. “But its use must be guided by responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters.” 

With over 90 million tracks in Deezer’s catalog, the platform is staking its reputation on curatorial integrity. While AI-driven hyper-personalization is on the rise, Deezer is betting listeners will still crave a human touch. Its detection tool, patented last December, acts as a gatekeeper by scanning uploads for the fingerprints of AI, such as subtle patterns in rhythm, timbre and structure that struggle to be masked.

Most detectors fail when faced with new AI models, but Deezer’s Chief Innovation Officer Aurélien Hérault claims their system adapts like a musical antibody, learning from datasets of known AI outputs to identify unknowns.

“Tools that are on the market today can be highly effective as long as they are trained on data sets from a specific generative AI model, but the detection rate drastically decreases as soon as the tool is subjected to a new model or new data,” Hérault explained. “We have addressed this challenge and created a tool that is significantly more robust and applicable to multiple models.”

With streaming royalties already a fractions-of-a-penny game, 10,000 AI tracks each day could siphon millions from working musicians in aggregate. Ergo, Deezer’s solution is to sideline AI tracks and ensure royalties flow primarily to human creators. Still, the question lingers, can any platform truly hold back the tide? 

You can read more via Deezer.

The bass may still drop, but where it lands is increasingly uncertain as TikTok hangs in the balance, leaving electronic music creators to navigate a social media landscape in flux.

ByteDance’s TikTok app became accessible to US users again on Sunday afternoon after a brief outage, which occurred as a federal law came into effect banning the platform unless the Chinese-owned company divests from it.

President Donald Trump then signed an executive order on Monday that precludes his Attorney General from enforcing the law for 75 days, affording his administration “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown” of TikTok.

However, the future of the platform that turned tracks like Kenya Grace’s “Strangers” into overnight sensations remains precarious. TikTok’s algorithmic boost helped catapult countless electronic artists into the mainstream, but that same dependence on short-form content has left many vulnerable to the app’s uncertain future—and adapting to a life without it.

From the grim “dancefloors” of pandemic metaverse raves to the mind-boggling Vegas Sphere, electronic music artists have always adapted to new spaces, but the potential ban has accelerated a diaspora of talent across platforms.

Mike Lisanti, founder of the LA-based artist management agency MLennial, believes Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are the most effective fallback options if TikTok’s ban is enacted—although he believes it’s not going anywhere.

“If a permanent ban were to happen, the amount of American jobs it would wipe within the US TikTok offices alone would be staggering to say the least,” said Lisanti, who stewards the careers of Seven Lions, Crankdat, BARELY ALIVE, Kompany and other influential electronic music producers. “Could its great algorithm go away if it gets bought? Maybe, but I do think focusing on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts will be the main way to supplement TikTok’s place in the market, as I don’t think any of these random Chinese TikTok replacement apps will be the answer.”

“If TikTok actually does get banned, I believe it’s the ultimate lesson for all creators to not put their eggs in one basket,” he continues. “I think that people need to prep for the worst—as always—and make sure that anything they are promoting on TikTok is repurposed for Instagram Reels (or as a first slide on a carousel), as well as YouTube Shorts, even if you have to deploy a plan to retroactively roll items out with style.”

The viral potential of that algorithm offered a tempting shortcut to recognition in an increasingly crowded field. But as TikTok’s future hangs in the balance, many are finding that the painstaking path of community-building is more sustainable in the long run.

“The most important thing for an artist to focus on is to do everything in their power to build an organic and authentic connection with their fans,” Lisanti adds. “The first second people notice a lack of authenticity, the trust is gone and it’s over. The fans are smart and guess what: they’re always right.”

Will Runzel, founder of the electronic music management powerhouse Prodigy Artists, points to SMS marketing as a vital strategy for fostering that genuine communication with fans.

“Artists should focus on building direct-to-consumer platforms that suit their needs. There are plenty of modernized options available for this,” says Runzel, who manages NGHTMRE and SLANDER, among other superstars. “In addition, SMS capture and communication remain crucial. It’s a reliable way to stay connected with fans, and it’s a strategy that’s unlikely to lose relevance anytime soon.”

If TikTok does ultimately find solid ground in the US, it may face a reckoning as the music industry’s most egregious diffuser of content culture, which often corrodes the creativity and mental health of artists. Considering the prevalent criticism of the platform for promoting a “content factory” mentality, Runzel believes a shift in mindset is crucial to avoiding burnout.

“Don’t approach it as ‘constant content creation.’ Instead, think about crafting visual art pieces to represent each track,” he explains. “Shift the mindset from ‘What content am I posting today?’ to ‘What visuals best express this music?'”

“And most importantly, prioritize your well-being,” Runzel adds. “Sleep well, stay hydrated and make time for yourself. Balance is everything.”

But if history tells us anything, it’s that the electronic dance music community thrives on both resilience and reinvention. Look no further than ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U, the Japanese DJ whose pulse-pounding Boiler Room set is currently going viral nearly a decade after he abandoned his construction job due to a malignant brain tumor.

As we dive into 2025, Lisanti’s message for producers is clear: adaptability is key.

“Unfortunately I mainly see the backlash coming from artists and industry folks that are unwilling to adapt,” he says. “The fans dictate who they want to support and see. Whether TikTok goes or not, artists are still on the hook for music-based short-form content on Instagram at the very least—whether it’s live or at home.”

“We live in a world where it’s not about needing to be the strongest or the ‘coolest’ to survive, but the most adaptable businesses are the ones that tend to last longest.”